James Tabor - The Deep Zone

She used her light to slash the darkness up and down, again and again, the signal divers used to alert each other, but saw no flashing in return. She began to feel the first nibble of fear in her belly. She stopped moving, took several deep breaths, let them out slowly.

She turned toward Cahner. He held his hands out, palms up, eyebrows raised. He looked afraid. Hoping to calm him, she put her hand on his forearm.

“We need to search.”

“How?”

“Cardinal directions first. You go north. Three hundred steps. I go south. We meet back here. Primary light and backups.”

They retrieved all the lights from their packs and started out from camp, walking away from each other’s backs as if they were duelists. It took her almost ten minutes to complete the three hundred steps, the terrain was that rugged and broken. As she went, Hallie searched on both sides slowly and carefully with her light, yelling Bowman’s name all the while. We are using way too much light , she thought, but there’s nothing else do to. We have to find Bowman .

Hallie reached the end of her search line and came back to their starting point. She was surprised to find that Cahner had beaten her there.

“Hallie, you’ve got to come see something.”

Her heart jumped. “Did you find him?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. Come on.”

Cahner headed back in the direction of his search route and she followed close behind, so anxious it was hard not to step on his heels. She expected them to walk for a long time, but they didn’t. Thirty feet at most.

“Stop!” Cahner’s voice was a bark, unusually sharp. She looked past his shoulder. There was a hole in the cave floor about twenty feet in diameter. “It’s deep, Hallie. Very deep.”

“How do you know?”

He stooped, picked up a baseball-sized rock, and tossed it into the hole. They waited. And waited. Nothing. But there was always the river’s roar covering everything else, so she picked up a larger rock herself and tossed it in and listened. Again, nothing.

“How deep would it have to be for us not to hear those rocks hitting bottom?” Cahner asked.

“A thousand feet, at least. Probably more.”

“Is that possible?”

“Anything’s possible in a cave like this.”

“If he fell in here…”

If he fell in here, he’s gone , Hallie thought. “I don’t think he fell in here.”

“Why not?”

“Why would he come over this way? Even if he did, Bowman was too experienced to just fall in. Not possible.”

“You just said anything is possible down here.”

She opened her mouth, shut it again. He was right about both. She had said that. And anything was possible. Motioning for him to stay where he was, she inched closer to the edge of the pit. The perimeters of shafts like this were often rotten and unstable, like big cornices on mountains. Stopping five feet from the lip, she played her light down into the darkness. The walls were dead vertical. Twenty feet down, a layer of thick mist ate her light. She glanced back at Cahner. “Too much fog. Can’t see.”

Standing there with her light on his chest, Hallie could see that Cahner looked used up. His eyes were bloodshot, the circles beneath them were almost black, the flesh of his face sagged, his body curved beneath unseen weight, even without the pack. He seemed to be having trouble holding his head up. Fatigue? Neck injury? He’s keeping it together with sheer willpower. Have to admire that .

Then a thought struck her: Do I look like that? She knew the answer, but there was nothing to do about it other than keep going. She pulled up the image she had seen in Don Barnard’s office, that soldier who had died so horribly, and it gave her strength.

“Now we do east and west. You go east.”

They started off again. Hallie headed west and made her three hundred steps more quickly this time, the route presenting fewer obstructions. She got back to their starting point first. Cahner returned five minutes later, held up his hands. They stared at each other.

Hallie shook her head, slumped against a boulder. You will not cry. You cannot afford that luxury here . Cahner came closer and patted her shoulder. Thoughts began to fly around in her mind like bats, darting, uncontrolled. A second later, she slapped herself hard, startling Cahner. Get yourself together. You have to find Bowman , she thought.

They could keep going out, following more points of the compass, northeast and southwest, northwest and southeast. But she was beginning to think the unthinkable, that they just might not find Bowman. She recalled the two scientists who had simply vanished when she had last been in this cave.

How had the cave done that? Those men were experienced cavers, and there were two of them. One, you could imagine dying by a fluke fall or getting hit by breakdown. But two? That stretched the limits of the imagination. And now Bowman. Not just anybody, but Bowman . The least likely man she had ever met to come to grief in a cave. Or anywhere, for that matter. And yet it was appearing more probable with each passing minute that that was exactly what had happened.

Cahner pointed toward the river. “I think we need to look down there. Maybe he went to pee, fell, and hurt himself. Maybe he can’t move.”

“That is where he went!” Hallie suddenly remembered. She regretted revealing the knowledge to Cahner because of what it would tell him, but the hell with it. She had been half asleep when Bowman had told her he was going to the river. She had given him her light. But Bowman being Bowman, he might not have turned it on, relying instead on his snapshot. Or he might have turned it on and still gotten too close to the rushing water and slipped.

It was, she realized, one of the easiest places to die in the whole cave. When did you need to pee? Middle of the night. Where did you go? To the river. What shape are you in? Half asleep. Jesus Christ .

“Let’s go see.” She pointed at his feet. “Be careful.”

They walked toward the river, and it was like walking down a wet, steeply pitched slate roof. Closer to it, the rocks became smooth, almost glassy, scoured by the action of grit-carrying water over countless eons. And right down close to the foaming water itself, Hallie could see that the rocks had an eerie shine, covered with a greenish algal growth that was almost invisible. She stood where she was. They played their lights up and down the riverbank, over and over. The river down here was so powerful that they felt it as much as heard it, their bodies vibrating with the energy that came up from the rocks, through their feet, and into their legs.

Flashing their lights, they walked back and forth both ways along the river, staying above the slippery algal sheen, for half an hour. Finally, she turned to Cahner and motioned for them to head back. There was no point in trying to make herself heard here.

They returned to their camp area and Hallie struggled to steady her voice. “He’s gone. Don’t know how, but gone. Probably the river.”

But her mind was filled with a simple, terrible question: How could he make such a mistake? He was tired, and exhaustion makes you careless, but still. How?

For a second, Cahner’s face looked like a pane of glass, pushed out of shape by great wind, in the moment just before it shattered. Hallie could sense the struggle going on within him, the urge for self-preservation warring with his conscious desire to help. Sometimes people lost that struggle and went berserk. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Al. I can’t do this alone. I need you .”

The words seemed to hit him like a slap. His head came up, his eyes clearing. He focused on her. She saw his jaw working, watched as the muscles of his face appeared to rearrange themselves, regaining tone and strength. He stood erect, swallowed, nodded. It was the first time she had ever seen him stand up really straight, and she realized that he was almost as tall as she. He took her hands from his shoulders and held them.